Health on Tap

Mingling easily with the sold-out crowd of eager young professionals crowding into a Boston brewery last Thursday to hear a local historian unpack the Gilded Age, Ty and Felecia Freely laugh more and grimace less than prototypical health entrepreneurs. Yet they may be cultivating exactly the sort of engagement health tech too often overlooks — and on which flourishing and longevity thrive.

Their brainchild, “Lectures on Tap,” was born in Brooklyn in 2024, after the Freelys, a married couple, moved from D.C. to New York and, as the New York Post put it, decided “to help build community in the Big Apple — by creating a positive space for like minds.” 

The model is simple: a compelling scholar gives an engaging talk for 30-45’, followed by a short Q&A, then people linger. The venues –- typically bars during slow, midweek nights — are casual, the tone unpretentious, the objective clear: to share ideas and spark conversations.

The couple was inspired by their own positive experience with a similar series, “Profs and Pints,” they had encountered in D.C. 

As Peter Schmidt, who launched Profs & Pints in D.C. in 2017, puts it: the ‘Profs’ are about easy access to knowledge — delivered by fairly paid faculty. The ‘Pints’ are about fun and conversation.

Lectures on Tap has maintained the dual aim of sharing knowledge and connecting people, while injecting a bit of social media panache. It’s a combustible mix: events sell out within minutes, and attendees have been enthralled by the topics. 

The debut talk, Your Brain on Movies, by Columbia neuroscientist Chris Baldassano, set the tone. Since then: The Mindf—k of Fame, AI vs. MD (by Columbia cardiologist Pierre Elias), and even 19th-Century Madams, among others.

Beyond New York and Boston, the series has also expanded to Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with more likely to follow. (No word on planned expansion beyond The Bubble but perhaps that’s in the cards as well.)

Attendees consistently describe to reporters the same experience: unexpectedly fun, disarmingly social. One put it simply: there’s a shortage of “third spaces” — locations outside work and home to meet people and enjoy a little intellectual stimulation. That’s the appeal.

Implications for Health & Flourishing

Why bring this up in a health column? Because this is a health story.

As I’ve emphasized in this column and beyond, platforms like Whoop, Oura, Peloton, and Tonal, particularly as they’ve pivoted from fitness to longevity, have fixated on measuring and endlessly optimizing metrics like steps and reps, sleep scores and VO₂.

But health and flourishing require a more capacious vision, embracing a set of vital but hard-to-quantify dimensions I describe as “soulful engagement” — with people, with ideas, with nature.

The value of these qualities may be – and should be — self-evident.  They are also supported by a substantial body of research. 

For example, the Harvard Study of Adult Development (as I’ve reviewed for TR readers) found that the best predictor of longevity was the quality of relationships with others.  Similarly, as the New York Times recently reported, Northwestern’s Super-Agers study found that a striking characteristic of long-lived adults is the high value they place on social relationships. 

(While not the focus of today’s column, there’s also compelling science linking time in nature with better health — value conveyed in less quantitative but far more resonant fashion by Nicholas Kristof, who recently described the restorative joy of hiking with family in our National Parks.  My brothers and I couldn’t endorse more fervently!)

Seen through the lens of flourishing, the Freelys truly are health entrepreneurs, sparking the mind and catalyzing connection with others. 

(If they ever staged a lecture at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Bar — majestic granite cliffs outside, lively ideas and conversation inside — they’d hit the engagement trifecta: connection, curiosity, and nature. I suspect that my colleague Luke Timmerman’s biotech hikes already achieve this routinely.)

The main reason I’ve highlighted the promise of initiatives like Lectures on Tap isn’t to contrast with health tech, but to remind us of health’s full scope.  The ideal platform would attend to both dimensions, motivating activity and recovery while also sparking curiosity, deepening connections, nurturing relationships.

It may sound like a lot to ask from fitness platforms. But as Peloton, Tonal, and others recast themselves as health companies, the response to the Freelys’ series points to an unmet, deeply human need, one that visionary platforms — fitness-born and health-aspiring — should aim to fulfill.